Two hundred high school students packed an auditorium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on Monday, Jan. 23, for a competition to program miniature satellites aboard the International Space Station. Alliance Rocket from the United States and virtual participants Alliance CyberAvo from Europe were named the winners in the third annual NASA-sponsored Zero Robotics SPHERES Challenge.

The Raspberry Pi is a ARM based single-board computer developed to run Linux for just $25 ($35 for model B with WiFi). The board contains an ARM1176JZFS, with floating point, running at 700Mhz, and a Videocore 4 GPU. The GPU is capable of BluRay quality playback, using H.264 at 40MBits/s. It has a fast 3D core accessed using the supplied OpenGL ES2.0 and OpenVG libraries. The board has an HDMI port, one USB 2.0 port, one micro USB port for power, an audio jack, RCA video out and a SD card slot.
They aren't taking orders yet but you can track the status by joining their mailing list here .

Hundreds of tech-savvy high school students from throughout Missouri and western Illinois will put their robotic creations to the test on Saturday, Feb. 25, during the FIRST Tech Challenge, a regional robotics championship for high school students hosted by Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T)

Jaybridge Robotics, a rapidly growing developer of software solutions for autonomous vehicles, is pleased to announce sponsorship of the 2012 MIT Battlecode Programming Competition. The tournament, now in its 11th year, is open to teams from MIT and other institutions.

A new assessment system has been developed by a team of researchers to more reliably predict whether surgeons are ready to operate on patients using the da Vinci robot. The new technology, called MScore, provides more precise analysis of actual surgical performance, which has been shown to be difficult to accomplish using common training approaches.

MIT researchers have identified a critical speed above which aircrafts and birds can definitely crash. According to them the northern goshawk, a bird that flies at high speed, observes a speed limit to protect itself from crashing into trees.

GIA announces the release of a comprehensive global outlook on the Laboratory Automation Industry. The growing need for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to make the process of drug discovery more speedy and efficient is driving opportunities in the global laboratory automation market.

Industrial Robotics - Featured Product

With the SLS, SOS, and STO functionalities, the SCHUNK EGN gripping system certified in accordance with DIN EN ISO 13849 enables safe human/machine collaboration. If the production process is interrupted by an emergency shut-off, the SCHUNK EGN goes into either a safely limited speed mode or a safe stop mode depending on the activated protection zone. In contrast to other solutions available on the market, the SCHUNK safety gripping system is continuously powered even in the safe operating stop so that the gripped parts are reliably held even without mechanical maintenance of gripping force. As soon as the protection zone is released, the gripper immediately switches back to the regular operating mode without the system having to be restarted.